Innovation and best practices for the Web

About this Blog

The blog is written by Brian Kelly. Brian is the Innovation Advocate based at CETIS, University of Bolton.

This blog functions as an open notebook which provides personal thoughts, reflections and observations on the role of the Web in higher and further education which I hope will inform readers and stimulate discussion and debate, both on this blog and elsewhere, including on Twitter.

The article highlighted the risks of mandating easy-to-read language and, following subsequent discussions with Alastair McNaught of JISC TechDis, led to a submission to the online symposium. Although reviewers of the paper commented that the submission provided “very sound ideas about how to approach e2r on level with other accessibility issues” and “The argument that the user perspective needs to be taken into account for discussing and defining “easy to read” makes a lot of sense” the paper was not accepted. Since the reviewers also suggested that “The authors should provide more material on how this step could be realized” and “More background on BS 8878 and a justification should be added” we decided to submit an expanded version of our paper to the current issue of the Ariadne Web magazine.

In “Does He Take Sugar?”: The Risks of Standardising Easy-to-read Language, Brian Kelly, Dominik Lukeš and Alistair McNaught highlight the risks of attempting to standardise easy-to-read language for online resources for the benefit of readers with disabilities. In so doing, they address a long-standing issue in respect of Web content and writing for the Web, i.e. standardisation of language. They explain how in the wake of the failure of Esperanto and similar artificial tongues, the latest hopes have been pinned on plain English, and ultimately standardised English, to improve accessibility to Web content. Their article seeks to demonstrate the risks inherent in attempts to standardise language on the Web in the light of the W3C/WAI Research and Development Working Group (RDWG) hosting of an online symposium on the topic. They describe the aids suggested by the RDWG such as readability assessment tools, as well as the beneficiaries of the group’s aims, such as people with cognitive, hearing and speech impairments as well as with readers with low language skills, including readers not fluent in the target language. To provide readers further context, they go on to describe earlier work which, if enshrined in WCAG Guidelines would have had significant implications for content providers seeking to comply with WCAG 2.0 AAA. They interpret what is understood in terms of ‘the majority of users’ and the context in which content is being written for the Web. They contend that the context in which transactional language should be made as accessible to everyone as possible differs greatly from that of education, where it may be essential to employ the technical language of a particular subject, as well as figurative language, and even on occasions, cultural references outside the ordinary. They argue that attempts to render language easier to understand, by imposing limitations upon its complexity, will inevitably lose sight of the nuances that form part of language acquisition. In effect they supply a long list of reasons why the use and comprehension of language is considerably more complex than many would imagine. However, the authors do not by any means reject out of hand the attempt to make communication more accessible. But they do highlight the significance of context. They introduce the characteristics that might be termed key to Accessibility 2.0 which concentrate on contextualising the use of content as opposed to creating a global solution, instead laying emphasis on the needs of the user. They proceed to detail the BS 8878 Code of Practice 16-step plan on Web accessibility and indicate where it overlaps with the WCAG guidelines. Having provided readers with an alternative path through the BS 8878 approach, they go on to suggest further research in areas which have received less attention from the WCAG guidelines approach. They touch upon the effect of lengthy text, figurative language, and register, among others, upon the capacity of some readers to understand Web content. The authors’ conclusions return to an interesting observation on the effect of plain English which might not have been anticipated – but is nonetheless welcome.

The article is of particular relevance since it brings home very clearly the limitations of WAI’s approach to Web accessibility and the belief that universal accessibility can be obtained by simply following a set of rules documented in the WCAG guidelines. As we’ve explained in the article, this isn’t the case for the language used in Web pages. However although the approach developed by WAI has significant flaws, the BS 8878 Code of Practice enables guidelines developed by WAI and other organisations to be used in a more pragmatic fashion. We hope that the experiences in using this Code of Practice described by EA Draffan in her talk on Beyond WCAG: Experiences in Implementing BS 8878 at the IWMW 2012 event help in the promoting greater use of this approach, including use of the standard to address the readability of Web pages.

UKOLN’s Ariadne ejournal has been running since it was launched under the JISC’s eLib programme way back in January 1996. The ejournal continues to provide a dissemination channel for project work, innovation and service developments across the UK’s higher and further education sector and the wider community.

It is true to say, however, that there is a need to develop Ariadne further in to exploit the variety of ways in which Web resources can now be accessed (including access on mobile devices) as well as introducing new functionality in response to users’ requests. A recent survey of Ariadne authors and readers has helped us to identify ways in which we can enhance Ariadne. We are currently working on developments to the Ariadne technical architecture and user interface. However we are aware that not all developments need to be done in-house since there are a variety of services which can be exploited in order to improve one’s own services.

Twitter provides a good example of a service which can be used as an alerting mechanisms for the publication of new issues. We are using the ariadne_ukoln account to publish information when a new issue is published and to provide links to the main articles. If you wish to be alerted in this way we suggest you follow the ariadne_ukoln account.

In addition to this Twitter channel itself we are also exploring other services which have been developed around Twitter which can further enhance access to Ariadne articles. In particular we have recently been evaluating the Smartr service. As described previously Smartr can be regarded as a news reader for Twitter on the iPhone (and iPod Touch). I’ve been using Smartr for a month or so on my iPod Touch and use it to access resources which have been linked to in tweets from various JISC services. If the resources are of particular interest I can then save the article on my mobile device to read later, whether on the device or on a desktop PC.

It occurred to me that this could be a useful tool for reading Ariadne articles on a mobile device, which could be implemented prior to the Ariadne redesign and implementation of mobile style sheets. Indeed such an approach might also be helpful in gaining experiences of the user interface which can help to inform the design of the style sheets.

In order to explore Smartr’s potential I set up a Twitter list which just contained the ariadne_ukoln feed. As can be seen, this provides access to tweets from the account. Viewing my Twitter list using Smartr enables me to view the contents of the links which had been included in the tweets, again as illustrated. Also note that in order to ensure that this service delivered relevant content we updated the policy on use of Twitter which now states that the Twitter channel will “concentrate on disseminating edited snippets about newly published articles with occasional further posts on trailing upcoming articles, seeking reviewers, developments to the Ariadne service, etc“.

In response to my post “Who Needs Murdoch – I’ve Got Smartr, My Own Personalised Daily Newspaper!” Anthony Leonard suggested that “Flipboard is the future” and went on to add “Personalised newspapers / magazine apps embedded around (university) websites may [be ] the missing link to bringing the long tail of news to those who can’t be bothered with RSS readers or Twitter“. I think he is right to highlight the importance of personalised newspapers but what has intrigued me is how an existing Web environment, such as Ariadne, can be made available to mobile devices through use of Twitter tools.